[hacelikewhoa]

Originally Posted by bwind22

I understand it and will now explain it. (My understanding and explanation should not be mistaken for agreement though.) ;)

The majority of the country is Christian. Marriage is a sacrament. The Christian definition of marriage is that it is a union between a man & woman vowing to God to spend their life together.

Where we, as a country, went completely wrong was that we forgot about keeping church seperate from state and began giving married couples special privelages that others don't get. So now Marriage has a legal definition as well as a Christian one. That is where we erred.

The Christians are against gay marriage because it infringes on their definition of marriage. The gays are for it simply because they want the same rights a married couple receives from the government.

This whole fiasco could have been avoided if marriage had just been left a religious term to begin with. Instead, the legal system could have called religious marriage a civil union and then granted special rights and privelages to civil unions, gay or straight, religious or secular.

*shrug*

Seems obvious, but because our government already fucked it up. I don't see how they can fix it now, aside from just calling marriage a civil union in legal terms and granting all current marital rights to all civil unions.

Basically, the religious folks want to protect the meaning of one of their sacraments. The gay people just want equal treatment. It's all caught up in the verbage being used though, which is pretty ridiculous to me.

I think you summed it up rather accurately. That's my biggest argument against banning gay marriage. The fact that we have the 'right' to are own religious beliefs and yet we still have laws enforced that are based on christian beliefs. It's all fucked.